Hollywood, in its death throes of the late 1960s, couldn’t decide if it wanted to be Rosemary’s Baby or a swinging martini commercial. And in 1971, we got The Mephisto Waltz, a supernatural horror film that does both, and neither, in equal measure. Directed by Paul Wendkos, a man best known for directing episodes of television where nobody remembered the director’s name, the film clutches Franz Liszt with one hand and the Devil’s coattails with the other, and somehow manages to trip over both. It’s a delirious gothic hallucination served on a paper plate, garnished with Jacqueline Bisset’s cheekbones and Alan Alda’s earnestness, which is never a recipe for terror unless you count the terror of enduring Alan Alda attempting to be mysterious.
Quinn Martin, the legendary TV producer who made a fortune putting cops and criminals on living room screens every week, produced this movie—his first and only big-screen venture. After watching it, you understand why he scurried back to television like a chastened alley cat.
Alan Alda, Satan’s Least Convincing Vessel
Alan Alda, future saint of MASH* reruns and avuncular PBS science specials, plays Myles Clarkson, a failed pianist who becomes a music journalist. Imagine being so unlucky that not only do you fail at your chosen career, you then have to watch Alan Alda pretending to play Liszt in a horror movie. Myles interviews Duncan Ely (Curt Jürgens), a world-renowned pianist who is also—spoiler alert—a dying Satanist with a taste for body swapping. Ely takes one look at Alda’s hands and sees destiny. The audience takes one look at Alda’s haircut and sees the inside of a Holiday Inn lounge act.
Jürgens, who always looked like he’d just woken up from a nap on a yacht, exudes the kind of decadent European sleaze you expect from a man who eats oysters in a silk robe at 10 a.m. He wants Alda’s body, and not in the way Hollywood producers usually wanted Alan Alda’s body in 1971. He wants to move in—literally. With the help of his daughter Roxanne (Barbara Parkins, all smoky eyes and incestuous purr), he trades bodies with Alda in a Satanic ritual that would make Aleister Crowley yawn.
Thus begins Alda’s transformation from humble journalist to possessed piano virtuoso. He goes from typing reviews in a dusty office to pounding Liszt onstage with the ferocity of a demon. Of course, he still looks like Alan Alda—earnest, kind-eyed, the guy who helps you move a couch—and therein lies the problem. Watching him try to be sinister is like watching Mister Rogers try to play Dracula.
Jacqueline Bisset, Beauty Against the Beast
Jacqueline Bisset, one of cinema’s most elegant migraines, plays Paula, Myles’ wife. She is beautiful in that remote, sculptural way that makes you want to apologize for breathing near her. Paula is suspicious from the start, glaring at Duncan Ely and especially at Roxanne with the disdain of a hostess who knows the other woman didn’t bring a proper bottle of wine. Bisset spends much of the film oscillating between grief, suspicion, and erotic confusion as her husband metamorphoses into a piano-playing cadaver with Satan’s forwarding address.
Her most horrifying moment comes when her daughter Abby is marked for death. Paula dreams of Duncan applying a bizarre blue substance to the child’s forehead—somewhere between clown makeup and Vicks VapoRub. When the child dies, we know two things: (1) Satan has claimed another innocent victim, and (2) nobody on the production team had the faintest clue how to make blue pancake makeup terrifying.
Bisset’s great trick, though, is that she somehow sells Paula’s descent into darkness. While Alda wrestles with demonic possession like a man fumbling through a tax return, Bisset slides into Satanism with the icy grace of someone trying on Dior. In the end, she steals the movie from everyone—literally—by swapping bodies with Roxanne in the tub, leaving her old shell behind like a mink coat at a pawn shop.
The Devil, Incest, and Soap Opera Suds
There’s an incestuous undercurrent in The Mephisto Waltz that’s treated with the delicacy of a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving. Roxanne and her father Duncan share a relationship that hovers somewhere between uncomfortably close and French art film. By the time Duncan inhabits Alda’s body, Roxanne is practically throwing herself at him like a teenager in a Beach Boys song. Paula, driven by grief and a newfound affection for Satan’s job perks, decides to even the playing field by possessing Roxanne’s body herself.
What follows is a finale that would be tragic if it weren’t so gloriously absurd: Paula, in Roxanne’s body, embraces her own husband’s possessed body, and the two of them prepare for their new life together in a Satanic rom-com for which the Devil surely never asked. If Hell has a Hallmark Channel, this is the kind of movie it airs at Christmas.
Jerry Goldsmith and the Soundtrack from Hell
Jerry Goldsmith, one of cinema’s greatest composers, contributes a score that makes you wish the film were half as good as its music. He leans heavily on the Franz Liszt “Mephisto Waltz,” a piece already dripping with demonic grandeur, performed here by Jakob Gimpel. The irony is that the film’s greatest moments come when nobody is speaking and Goldsmith’s music drowns out the dialogue like an act of mercy.
Unfortunately, the soundtrack album, released decades later, excluded the Gimpel performance. Perhaps the Devil himself demanded that nobody ever hear Alan Alda pretend to play piano again.
Cinematic Style: Soap with Satanic Bubbles
Paul Wendkos shoots the film like a television drama trying desperately to look cinematic. Interiors are lit with the flatness of a daytime soap opera, while the California coast exteriors stand in awkwardly for the New York setting of the novel. The editing, courtesy of Richard K. Brockway, has the rhythm of a man nodding off in church.
There are dream sequences filled with blue filters and occult paraphernalia, but they feel more like bad perfume commercials than genuine nightmares. Roman Polanski, fresh off Rosemary’s Baby, could make a crib mobile terrifying. Wendkos makes Satan’s minions look like people late for dinner reservations in Malibu.
Why It Still Matters
And yet, in spite of itself, The Mephisto Waltz has a strange, kitschy charm. It is the cinematic equivalent of an old Ouija board found in a thrift store—dusty, cheap, and more likely to give you splinters than summon demons, but fascinating in its promise of darkness. For a 1971 audience, still reeling from Nixon and napalm, the idea of Satan as a chic, piano-loving swinger probably hit closer to home than we care to admit.
Watching it today, the film plays like a precursor to all those glossy supernatural thrillers of the 1970s that wanted to cash in on occult chic without actually frightening anyone. Think of it as Dynasty by way of Anton LaVey, with Alan Alda in a turtleneck trying to conjure menace between takes.
Final Verdict
The Mephisto Waltz is not a good movie, but it is a deliciously weird one. It’s a relic from an era when Hollywood believed that Satan could sell tickets as easily as Steve McQueen. Alan Alda is woefully miscast but fascinating to watch, like a Labrador retriever auditioning for the role of Hannibal Lecter. Jacqueline Bisset gives it more gravitas than it deserves, while Barbara Parkins slinks around like Satan’s own soap opera star.
If you like your horror films terrifying, look elsewhere. But if you like them strange, decadent, and faintly ridiculous, The Mephisto Waltz will charm you the way a cobra charms a field mouse—hypnotic, absurd, and fatal only if you take it too seriously.
In the end, it’s a Faustian bargain not worth making, but worth watching—if only to see Alan Alda wrestle with Satan and lose convincingly.
